Monday, November 24, 2014

Serio: A serial file transfer program without needing z/y/xmodem

In one of my previous posts I talked about using zmodem as a backup/emergency method to transfer files onto an embedded device using the serial console. This technique requires you to have the lrzbinary on the target to initiate the transfer. But what happens if you have no way of getting lrz onto the target in the first place? In this post I show you a method of serial transfer requiring no binaries to be on the target, and absolutely no setup on the target-side.

First, check that you have a Python 2.x version installed. If you don't, apt-get or yum install it onto your host OS. Check the version with python --version.

Now get the utility, which is called 'serio'. Get it with hg clone https://code.google.com/p/serio/. Before you go ahead, there are two patches you need to apply (by hand):